Sung-Gu Heo

Comparison of Soil Loss Estimation using SWAT and SATEEC

Soil erosion is a natural process and has been occurring in most areas in the watershed. However, accelerated soil erosion rates have been causing numerous environmental impacts in recent years. To reduce soil erosion and sediment inflow into the water bodies, site-specific soil erosion best management practices(BMPs) need to be established and implemented. The most commonly used soil erosion model is the Universal Soil Loss Equation(USLE), which have been used in many countries over 30 years. The Sediment Assessment Tool for Effective Erosion Control(SATEEC) ArcView GIS system has been developed and enhanced to estimate the soil erosion and sediment yield from the watershed using the USLE input data. In the last decade, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool(SWAT) model also has been widely used to estimate soil erosion and sediment yield at a watershed scale. The SATEEC system estimates the LS factor using the equation suggested by Moore and Burch, while the SWAT model estimates the LS factor based on the relationship between sub watershed average slope and slope length. Thus the SATEEC and SWAT estimated soil erosion values were compared in this study. The differences in LS factor estimation methods in the SATEEC and SWAT caused significant difference in estimated soil erosion. In this study, the difference was -51.9%(default threshold)～-54.5%(min. threshold) between SATEEC and non-patched SWAT, and -7.8%(default threshold)～+3.8%(min. threshold) between SATEEC and patched SWAT estimated soil erosion.

Characteristics of Nonpoint Source Pollutant Loads from Forest watershed with Various Water Quality Sampling Frequencies

A monsoon season monitoring data from June to September, 2005 of a small forested watershed located at the upstream of the North Han River system in Korea was conducted to analyze the flow variations, the NPS pollutant concentrations, and the pollution load characteristics with respect to sampling frequencies. During the 4month period, 1,423 mm or 79.2% of annual rainfall(1,797 mm) were occurred and more than 77%, 54% and 68% of annual T-N, NO3-N and T-P loads discharged. Flow rate was continuously measured with automatic velocity and water level meters and 58 water quality samples were taken and analyzed. It was analyzed that the flow volume by random measurement varied very widely and ranged from 79% to 218% of that of continuous measurement. It was recommended that flow measurement of small forested watersheds should be continuously measured with automated flow meters to precisely measure flow rates. Flow-weighted mean concentrations of T-N, NO3-N and T-P during the period were 2.114 mg/L, 0.836 mg/L, and 0.136 mg/L, respectively. T-N, NO3-N and T-P loads were sensitive to the number of samples. And it was analyzed that in order to measure the pollution load within the error of 10% to the true load, the rate of sampling frequency should be higher than 89.7% of the sample numbers that were required to compute the true pollution load. If it is compared to selected foreign research results, about 10 water samples for each rainfall event were needed to compute the pollution load within 10% error. It is unlikely in Korea and recommended that thorough NPS pollution monitoring studies are required to develop the standard monitoring procedures for reliable NPS pollution quantification.

Simulation of Hydrological and Sediment Behaviors in the Doam-dam Watershed considering Soil Properties of the Soil Reconditioned Agricultural Fields

The alpine agricultural activities are usually performed at higher and steep areas in nature. Thus, significant amounts of soil erosion are occurring compared with those from other areas. Thus, the soil erosion induced environmental impacts in these areas are getting greater. The Doam watershed is located at alpine areas and it has been well known that the agricultural activities in the watershed are causing accelerated soil erosion and water quality degradations. Many modeling approaches were employed to solve soil erosion and water quality issues. In this study, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model was utilized to simulate the hydrologic and sediment behaviors in the Doam watershed. In many previous modeling studies, the digital soil map and its corresponding soil properties were used without modification to reflect soil conditioning at many agricultural fields of the Doam watershed. Thus, the soil sample was taken at the agricultural field within the Doam watershed and analyzed for its physical properties. In this study, the digital topsoil properties in the agricultural fields within the Doam watershed were replaced with the soil properties for reconditioned soil analyzed in this study to simulate the impacts of using soil properties for reconditioned soil in hydrologic and sediment modeling at the Doam watershed using the SWAT model. The hydrologic component of the SWAT model was calibrated and validated for measured flow data from 2002 to 2003. The value was 0.79 and the EI value was 0.53 for weekly simulated data. The calibrated model parameters were used for hydrologic component validation and the value was 0.86 and the EI value was 0.74 for weekly data. For sediment comparison, the value was 0.67 and the EI value was 0.59. These statistics improved with the use of soil properties of the reconditioned soil in the field compared with the results obtained without considering soil reconditioning. The simulated sediment amounts with and without considering the soil properties of the reconditioned soil were 284,813 ton and 158,369 ton, respectively. This result indicates that there could be approximately 79% of errors in estimated sediment yield at the Doam watershed, although the model comparison with the measured data gave similar satisfactory statistics with and without considering soil properties from the reconditioned soil.

Analysis of Flow-Weighted Mean Concentration(FWMC) Characteristics from Rural Watersheds

Stream flow and water quality were measured and analyzed with respect to flow-weighted mean concentrations (FWMCs) of 21 rainfall events from a forested watershed (Forest Research Watershed: FRW) and two mixed watersheds of agriculture and forest (YuPo-Ri Watershed: YPW and WolGog-ri Watershed: WGW) located in the middle of the North Han River basin. The monitoring of each watershed was one year and conducted between 2004 and 2006. YPW showed more intensive agricultural practices than WGW where traditional practices were common. The average of the 21 FWMCs were in the order of YPF>WGW>FRW and were significantly different from each other at the level of 0.05. It was shown that the land use with intensive agricultural practices produced and discharged more NPS pollutants than that with traditional practices and forest. Specially, SS concentrations from the mixed watersheds were significantly higher than those from FRW. Influencing factors on runoff were analyzed rainfall and watershed area. And rainfall intensity was greater impact on runoff than daily rainfall. Measured water quality indices were shown positive correlations among them in general. However, no significant correlation was shown between COD and nutrients(T-N and T-P).

Enhancement of the SATEEC Soil Erosion and Sediment Modeling System with Better Sediment Delivery Ratio Module

The soil erosion has been one of the biggest concerns in Korea as well as in other countries because of its impacts on ecology and water quality in the receiving water bodies. Among many computer models simulating soil erosion at field and watershed scale has been integrated with the Geographic Information System (GIS) because its nature is essentially spatial. The prototype and enhanced version of the Sediment Assessment Tool for Effective Erosion Control (SATEEC) system utilizes the area-based sediment delivery ratio methods. However the sediment delivery mechanism is not solely dependent on the watershed area. Thus new sediment delivery ratio estimation module was automated in the SATEEC system by considering watershed area, watershed relief ratio, and average Curve Number for all sub watersheds in the watershed having each cell as an outlet. The estimated sediment delivery ratio shows the spatial variability and could provide soil erosion decision makers with better information regarding soil erosion and sediment yield behaviors. This result can be used to identify the most critical areas and assess the effects on sediment yield of soil erosion best management practices implemented in the critical areas. However, new sediment delivery ratio method needs to be extended for its application for the bigger watershed because of limitations in ArcView GRID library in the number of processes. Thus the works are undergoing to port the ArcView 3.x based SATEEC system into the ArcGIS platform.

Evaluation of Applicability of the ESTIMATOR Model for the Analysis of Nutrient Load Characteristics

It has been well-known that the Nonpoint Source (NPS) pollutions are the primary contributors to water quality degradation in the receiving water bodies as well as the Point Source (PS) pollutions. To develop an effective management practice for water quality improvement, pollutant loads must be first estimated. In many studies, the Numeric Integration (NI) method has been used because of its ease of application, irrespective of the total number of samples collected for each storm event. Thus, there have been needs for more accurate pollutant load estimation with a limited number of water quality samples. In this study, NI method and regression method using the USGS ESTIMATOR model were comparatively used to calculate the pollutant loads for the Wolgokri watershed, Gangwon Province. The -N, T-N, and T-P loads using NI method and ESTIMATOR model were 13.85 kg/ha, 45.92 kg/ha, and 1.887 kg/ha, and 11.93 kg/ha,43.20 kg/ha, and 1.650 kg/ha, respectively. The estimated loads using ESTIMATOR model were lower than those using NI method by , , and . These discrepancies in the estimated loads using a different load estimation method could be explained in that the total number of samples were not sufficient enough for NI method. Thus, ESTIMATOR model is recommended for the frequently stream discharge and less frequently measured water quality data.